Cooperation in Theorem Proving by Loosely Coupled Heuristics

We present a cooperation concept for automated theorem provers that isbased on a periodical interchange of selected results between several incarnationsof a prover. These incarnations differ from each other in the search heuristic theyemploy for guiding the search of the prover. Depending on the strengths' andweaknesses of these heuristics different knowledge and different communicationstructures are used for selecting the results to interchange.Our concept is easy to implement and can easily be integrated into alreadyexisting theorem provers. Moreover, the resulting cooperation allows the dis-tributed system to find proofs much faster than single heuristics working alone.We substantiate these claims by two case studies: experiments with the DiCoDesystem that is based on the condensed detachment rule and experiments with theSPASS system, a prover for first order logic with equality based on the super-position calculus. Both case studies show the improvements by our cooperationconcept.